


older now, and the light is dim

by WISHBONE



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Crowley's pronouns vary, M/M, The Dowling Household, brief mentions of the awful things humans have done to each other through history, on the nature of children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 14:01:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19975255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WISHBONE/pseuds/WISHBONE
Summary: Aziraphale follows the sound, silently, to the door of the sitting room where he sees them. Ashtoreth - Crowley - holding a sleeping, months-old anti-christ in the most gentle of hands and pillowed against her perfectly pressed bloused. She sways slightly as she sings, her lips brushing the downy hairs at the child's temple, her eyes hooded low. Every now and then, the child fusses and squirms, and Crowley readjusts him slightly in her arms with practiced ease.





	older now, and the light is dim

**Author's Note:**

> entirely inspired by [this incredible work](https://gingerhaole.tumblr.com/post/186477308342/nanny-crowley-is-a-softie-its-not-up-for).

Aziraphale has just slipped into the kitchen of the main house when he hears it, the softest shushings, a low steady hum. It is the very smallest hours of the morning and the little kitchen in his groundskeeper's cottage is out of milk. He freezes because he _knows_ that melody - it's one that he's not heard since the last days of the Assyrian empire, scattered like so many ashes in the winds of history - but, more pressingly, he knows that _voice_ , has recognised it unfailingly amongst the rise and fall of civilisations.

He follows the sound, silently, to the door of the sitting room where he sees them; Ashtoreth - Crowley - holding a sleeping, months-old anti-christ in the most gentle of hands and pillowed against her perfectly pressed blouse. She sways slightly as she sings, her lips brushing the downy hairs at the child's temple, her eyes hooded low. Every now and then, the child fusses and squirms, and Crowley readjusts him slightly in her arms with practiced ease. She hasn't noticed Aziraphale at the threshold. He doesn't want to intrude, but neither can he look away, his gaze caught by the tender bend of Crowley's wrist, the minute sway of her skirt, the single curl which has fallen loose at the nape of her neck. 

Eventually, inevitably, she turns and spots him. Aziraphale feels fixed in place by her gaze, by the steady challenge in the set of her brows. Her humming stops. She seems to curl, ever so slightly, around the anti-christ, twisting the child so that she is between it and Aziraphale. He supposes it is foolish of him to be surprised. While Crowley has always deflected attention away from any suggestion of the good in him, his attitude towards children has always been clear, whatever form he takes. He has never shied away from his manifest _love_ for them, defiant in his defence of their innocence. Never wavering, not for Heaven, Hell or anything in between. 

"Brother Francis," she says, and then, "Angel." Aziraphale finds that she is inscrutable to him in this moment, an obsidian pool of indeterminate depth. The feeling is foreign. Crowley has always bared herself to him. He thinks that this might be some kind of test, and steps further into the room, hoping against all hope that he is able to meet it. He misses her quiet singing.

"My dear," he says, and makes a very conscious decision to let the great swell of emotions crowding his lungs show upon his face, because his throat is still far too tight to voice them. Crowley holds the end of the world in her arms like it's nothing and everything, and despite, Aziraphale knows, the fact that she is terrified. Aziraphale is enthralled, overcome. He is in love, and has been for a very long time.

Crowley must read something in him that satisfies her, because though her position does not change, she relaxes ever so slightly and lets Aziraphale approach, leans in when Aziraphale lays a reverent, shy hand on her elbow and then her hip. "He's been fussing all night. We've just had a bottle, but every time I put him down he starts again. I think," Crowley's voice goes very, very soft, "he just wants to be held. Children need that, to know there's someone there for them, loving them." 

Aziraphale gazes upon the face of the sleeping child who is, in just over a decade, to end the world. The tiny bow of his mouth, his little hand, fisted at his cheek with fingerprints that formed when he first reached out to touch his mother in the womb. He smells new, soft and utterly unremarkable. Aziraphale thinks of all the children that came before him. From Cain to Christ and beyond. The ones that will come after. He thinks of the thousands that he and Crowley were unable to save, the ones who died in famine and plague, wars and gas chambers, their lives unwitnessed and knowing only the darkest valleys of humanity and the cruelest, sharpest edges of the earth. Aziraphale thinks of the ones they did, on orders or despite them: the children Crowley smuggled out of cities soon to be levelled by a flood; the little girl who's hand he'd held as Moses parted the Red Sea, her grip tight and sure, because she was terrified and brave and because she had no other choice, her home in flames behind her; and thousands of years later, the Tunisian boy, who they had seen scrounging for food scraps in a city wracked by riots and revolution, who's backpack Crowley had miraculously filled to bursting with fresh bread and milk and honey. They had both watched as he ran back to his friends and handed out loaves, grinning and ecstatic to have something to share, to give, to see his friends’ hunger sated, not yet questioning the world and why it causes some to starve while others reap. Never second guessing miracles. 

"Yes, my dear," he says, and draws Crowley and the child more fully into his arms, "I think you're quite right."

**Author's Note:**

> i know very little about children but have a lot of feelings about them. 
> 
> comments and criticisms are appreciated as always.


End file.
